Interesting title for a less so topic. Recycling.
Since starting a business that generates plastic waste I can’t help but feel a little cynical about my previous self’s rigid adherence to home recycling. To be clear i still make great efforts to recycle anything I can in my home – all cans and bottles, metal, paper, cardboard, #1 plastic, and even occasionally plastic film which a which I never fail to forget to bring to my local Lowes recycling bin – resulting in overflowing receptacles in my home and garage. I understand the nagging feeling you get when you see a bottle or can carelessly placed in your home trash bin by a guest or at work by a coworker. You don’t want to preach, but you do want to preach. Ultimately you just pit it out of the trash yourself and sort as needed and move on.
But lately I’ve been doing this less due to a change in perspective. By having a business that generates plastic waste, inside our own facilty and indirectly to every happy customer we make, my potential impact is so much greater by improving recycling methods inside our company that the decisions I face at home when I mull over how perfect I can be at the task. You think to yourself and explain to others, if everybody in the country picked one bottle out of the recycling that would be 400 million bottles recycled that wouldn’t have been otherwise. You can be the change!
We ask what we can do to help the environment, and the experts tell us all the things we can do. But its hard not to see this as merely a process of atonement rather than useful progress. The people asking these questions already recycle and are already concerned about the environment. There’s only so much we can squeeze out of this population. An analogy would be covid vaccinations. Giving the vaccinated more shots is helpful for them, but its not the progress we need as a world. We need people who aren’t doing it to do it. We need to change minds. This process is unfortunately long and slow.
The top down approach has much more immediate potential effect.
Being an vocal advocate is more useful than personal choices.
Governments are the ultimate tool
Plastic bag ban, climates accords etc
Mcdonalds recycled napkins